Child Protection Minister Rachel Sanderson unaware girl in state care fell pregnant to predator Matthew James McIntyre
SA’s Child Protection Minister was unaware a 13-year-old in state care fell pregnant to a child sex predator until he was jailed.
SA News
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The Child Protection Minister has shamed her department’s former incident reporting system and said she was unaware a 13-year-old girl under state care was impregnated by a predator until this week.
Rachel Sanderson said changes were made to the reporting policies — that formerly meant she would not be alerted to extreme cases such as this — earlier this year after the incident occurred.
But she said she was only made aware of the case following Tuesday’s sentencing of the 35-year-old man in the case.
“I share the community’s deep concerns about this incident and … I’m equally disappointed that I was not notified earlier,” Ms Sanderson said on Thursday.
“There was a review early this year where we looked at the policy of significant incidents, the reporting and the flowchart.
“When we reviewed the policy, I was shocked to find I wouldn’t be notified of all incidents of this nature.
“The changes we made were after this incident so that in future this should not happen again without my knowledge.”
The SA opposition has called for an independent inquiry into the case. However, Ms Sanderson said she would not take advice from a former government that left “chaos and crisis”.
“Services have been put around the child, a complex case review has been undertaken by lead psychiatrist Prue McEvoy and she has been referred to specialist services,” Ms Sanderson said.
The 13-year-old girl, who is in state care, was impregnated by a man she met on a dating app called Mylol.
The offending came to light in January this year when a youth worker noticed the teen acting uncharacteristically.
Matthew McIntyre, 35, was jailed for almost two years on Tuesday after messages between him and the teenager were reported to the police who discovered the teen was pregnant.
Opposition leader Peter Malinauskas said Ms Sanderson was “completely out of her depth”.
“This occurred back in January. It is inexplicable the Minister didn't know about this but what is completely unjustified is her total lack of action to make sure this never happens again,” he said.
“The minister tried to talk this away as though there is no requirement for her to do anything about this. (She) needs to accept some responsibility and deliver an action plan at the very least to get to the bottom of how this happened in the first place.”
While Premier Steven Marshall said he was “not happy” Ms Sanderson didn’t know about the case, he said the government was taking action to ensure it never happened again.
“I don’t think as a government we’ve ever had the threshold right for critical incidents reporting to ministers,” Mr Marshall told reporters.
“This is something we discussed in cabinet following the Ann Marie Smith case and what we’ve done since coming to government is change that threshold which is going through the system at the moment.
“I want my ministers and my cabinet informed about these critical incidents so we can know about them earlier and take corrective action.”
